As per the topic's title, I am looking for a lossless codec that offers a nice compression (something around Monkey's Audio's High) along with a nice encoding/decoding speed (I am more concerned about the decoding). I initially stumbled upon TAK, which had everything I could ask for, but much to my demise, I found out that the playback of TAK is rather buggy—the official Winamp plug-in does not work well with 24/96 files (even though the TAK format supports high resolutions). Furthermore, I would ideally want the codec to be stable.

I would be very grateful to anyone who helps.

PS: Before mentioning FLAC, I have to say that I am dissatisfied with the compression it offers, as my storage space is pretty limited (and won't be improving until this summer at earliest).

Whenever I try to open a file encoded in Monkey's Audio Very High, my CPU needs like 2-3 seconds to start playing back—the same happens with seeking. I don't really like that (I don't like it at all), seeing as I use lossless files for listening purposes as well as for archiving.

Whenever I try to open a file encoded in Monkey's Audio Very High, my CPU needs like 2-3 seconds to start playing back—the same happens with seeking. I don't really like that (I don't like it at all), seeing as I use lossless files for listening purposes as well as for archiving.

But that's not necessarily the CPU, slow hard disc drive, fragmented drives, there could be any number of reasons but as others have said it's not the codec.